Teaching physical education : studies on student and teacher behaviour

Abstract

This research provided descriptive data on student and teacher behaviour over a series of related physical education lessons and also examined the effect of feedback to teachers on the quantity and quality of student behaviour during these lessons. In Study One eight teachers were observed teaching their classes in their school's gymnasium within the regular school timetable. A modified version of the Academic Learning Time - Physical Education observation system (Siedentop, Tousignant and Parker, 1982) was used to take repeated measures of the behaviour of the teacher and the behaviour of two randomly selected high, average and low achieving students in each class across all lessons.

Study One showed that the teachers allocated less than half of the available lesson time for student participation with the learning tasks. Over all classes less than 20.0% of student time was spent in Motor-on-Task behaviour with a range from 11.2% to 29.2%. The three student achievement groups within each class spent similar amounts of time in Motor-on-Task behaviour and performed similar numbers of learning trials, but differed in the proportion of successful learning trials experienced. The high achievers always performed with the greatest percentage of success on the learning trials and the average achievers performed with more success than the low achievers. Across all classes, Cognitive behaviour was the most prevalent student behaviour.

In Study Two a multiple baseline design across teachers was used to evaluate the effects of feedback to teachers of behavioural data gathered in baseline lessons. Two teachers received such feedback while a third teacher served as a control. Both teachers who received feedback increased the amount of time students spent in Motor-on-Task behaviour (+15%). While this increase provided the students with more learning trials only one of the two teachers was able to increase the percentage of success of all student achievement groups when performing the learning trials. The high achievers performed with the highest percentage of success in classes taught by both teachers. Increases in Motor-on-Task behaviour did not occur at the expense of any one other student behaviour. There was considerable variance within each intervention class for all behaviours. There were no substantial differences in student behaviour between the three classes taught by the teacher who did not receive feedback. The study showed that while there were considerable differences in how physical education lessons were implemented, the two teachers were able to respond to feedback and to modify their lessons so that the amount of student participation was increased.